Learning through Inquiry, Action, and Reflection

PI: Nate Bickford, University of Great Falls

A good college education in this day and age should help students become integrative
thinkers who engage in solving real problems. Thus, an authentic research experience
should be a part of every college student�s curriculum. Our class sizes at the University
of Great Falls are small enough to be able to provide such an experience for our
students. It is particularly important to engage entry level students in �problem-posing�,
so as to stimulate a better understanding of scientific principles, and, more importantly,
the desire to continue to advance the study of science.

The strongest component of an inquiry-based course should be opportunities for
practice and reflection to encourage the development of metacognitive skills.
Presenting students with open-ended problems, such as the design and execution of
their own lab experiment, allows them to test their preconceptions, entertain competing
hypotheses, and finally, attempt to make conclusions. Consequently, we need to
reorganize our information and resources for the General Biology Lab curriculum to
better support student centered inquiry. The lab curriculum will be divided into four
�topic blocks� each semester and include four elements. One element will provide
background information on the research area using recent primary literature. Another
element will offer a research-based simulation to provide students a hands-on
experience with the experimental system. A third element will include a set of open
research questions that students might address. The final element will be to outline the
resources available in the Biology department that students might use to further
investigate the research question.